AirPi Cellular Raspberry Pi Shield Presented by Antronics

This is the kind of developer community story we love: What happens when Snootlab, a French startup that designs and distributes open hardware, meets one of the most active embedded application development experts of the Sierra Wireless developer community, Antronics, based in the UK?

Antronics, aka Andy Neil, aka awneil on the Forum (with more than 6,000 Forum posts so far, you’re unlikely to have missed him) has developed IoT applications for his customers for many years, and in particular with Sierra Wireless AirPrime smart modules.

When at last year’s Sierra Wireless Developer Day in Paris, Frédéric (Fred) Jourdan from Snootlab presented their upcoming Raspberry Pi shield AirPi, based on the AirPrime SL8 smart module, Andy knew it could be more than a Raspberry cellular (3G+GPS) shield: He'd like to test it as a standalone development kit for SL8 too.

That's why Andy was the very first person to purchase an AirPi from Snootlab as soon as it was made available, and of course he tested it right away. In his typical helpful fashion, Andy has documented all the steps involved in assembling the AirPi on the Antronics blog.

And now, here's what Andy suggests you try out as your first application with the AirPi as a standalone kit: receive and send SMS. Of course, this can work with the shield connected to the Raspberry Pi too.

We bet Snootlab won’t stop here, and will continue to create wireless open hardware shields with Sierra Wireless modules (what about an Arduino one guys?). We bet Antronics won’t stop here either (what about small Open AT applications running on these wireless processors in order to ease the lives of users of these open hardware shields?).

Both Andy and Fred will be back at the Sierra Wireless Innovation Summit (formerly Developer Day), which takes place on June 17 this year in Paris. Don’t miss the opportunity to meet them! We’ll have many questions to ask them too.